And the usual disclaimer applies, there were too many great tunes to include them all, so treat this more as a selection rather than a comprehensive round-up of the year. Enjoy.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Constellation

“You’re used to quiet words
and so am I
so I’ll just whisper“

Tiny Ruins – Dream Wave

“always a dream wave drawing you off track
dream wave, a coast calls you back“

Magana – Get it Right

“You were red but my gold turned you green
So you stood there lying through your teeth“

deer scout – holy ghost

“I could find a new kind of devotion
I could know you by another name“

Hovvdy – Meg

“Speak because i know you feel a certain way
but ill pass it along anyway“

Bedbug – Leaving Town, Moving to a National Park <3

“I’m too young for that anyways
everyone’s just tryna skip town these days“

Soccer Mommy – Skinned Knees

“i left
burning streets in tennessee
for a north east feel“

Mitski – Your Best American Girl

“Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me
But I do, I finally do“

LVL UP – Hidden Driver

“God is peeking
softly speaking
fucking everything
until I slowly do see“

Lisa Prank – Starting Again

“You say you’re not still drinking
you just started again
I swear I don’t still miss you
I just started again“

Dicktations – Dicktations Forever

“It’s hard to say when I first figured out something was wrong“

Joyride! – Running on Empty

“Young and running on empty
you said that you thought I looked pretty with my makeup on
so I went home and I took it off“

Sioux Falls (now Stranger Ranger) – Dom

“Spending too much time on the internet
are you ok? you don’t seem very into it“

Camp Cope – Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

“It’s the trophy wives raising trophy wives raising children on TV
Scared of people like you and me
Just don’t ask questions you’ll sleep peacefully
We will not go out in silence and we will not go quietly“

Fake Boyfriend – BUMTOWN

“Why do I cling to the threads that mean the least?“

Outer Spaces – I Saw You

“I saw you, a shedding snake“

American Enthusiasm – Holy Wow

“Make a note of all the words I cough out on my death bed“

The Hotelier – Soft Animal

“Fawn, doe, light snow
Spots on brown of white 
make me believe that there’s a God sometimes“

Beach Slang – Future Mixtape for the Art Kids

“We’re not lost, we are dying in style
We’re not fucked, we are fucking alive“

CHUCK – Death

“You hold on to whatever kin
that keeps on breathin’ in
that keeps you from driftin’
like paper in the wind“

You Won’t – Ya Ya Ya

“So your daddy was a poltergeist
sent your little sister screaming down the hallway
well I don’t know about the afterlife,
but I can help you to forget about the old days“

Mountain Almanac – Kids Playing Outside

“Saturday morning, cartoon time, let’s go“

Basement Revolver – Johnny

“Please just stay away from Johnny
cos I love him understand“

Boy Scouts – Did You See My Cry

“walking walmart shopping center
i’d never been better
on my own two feet
i guess“

Free Cake For Every Creature – First Summer in a City

“i’ll be singing when i’m 90
climb a tree to see
what tastes to smokey sweet
first summer in a city“

Haley Heynderickx – First I’m Sorry

“Mother knows I drown in my lies
Father knows I learned my lesson the second time.
Ask me where I’ll go I’ll say do not know
No, I do not know“

ARMS – Missing

“I don’t want to force your hand
but wishes disguised as plans will never do
Like the king of deathbed regrets
and the queen of last requests could ever choose“

Naps – Bad Vibrations

“Can’t stand up to the world’s expectations
I’m living on a bad bad vibration“

The Washboard Abs – Day Draws Nearer

“Your backyard
you talked to God
about the heartbreak you forgot“

Trace Mountains – Forgiveness

“old dirt you thrown underneath the stair
is right there
right where you said i’d tremble and stare
at the vast unforgiving spirit lurking there
but it takes time, to realise forgiveness“

Nassau – Desert Blues

“I took a marker and wrote your number on the bathroom stall
That’s just my way of reaching out cos I’m too proud to call“

Adeline Hotel – Near You

“Sleep better tonight
In the heat of red moon light
Whatever we are, whatever we’ll be
I used to live near you, you used to love near me“

Simon Balto – Foothills

“I’ve never been a faithful man
I’ve always been too proud to pray
But won’t you come out to the foothills
And hold me together for one more day“

Cloud Cult – No Hell

“There’s no use in running unless you run like heck
The best things we’ve learned we learned from the wreck
Jesus coming back as a woman this time
Handing out hugs in the clinic line
Someone tell the devil we don’t need no hell
We’re all pretty good at beating up ourselves“

Slingshot Dakota – Break

“And in the end there’s two of us
it was always two of us“

Good Good Blood – No Sadness/Furrowed Brow

“We’ll have no sadness/furrowed brow
There is no shame in dying now
I said from my death bed“

Ben Seretan – Bowl of Plums

“My friends call me when they’re feeling low
We talk quietly for hours and walk the room
Flowers growing in a coffee can
Our lives are wonderful and sad sometimes“

Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost

“I got a Big Ghost
of static in my throat
from coming up too short“

Wintersleep – Metropolis

“The man that you are, the man you were, the man you left
Turn into stars, flowing in through the wilderness“

Mothers – Lockjaw

“I don’t want your kind words
I want your ghost inside a thimble“

Car Seat Headrest – Drunk Driver / Killer Whales

“You build yourself up against others’ feelings
And it left you feeling empty as a car coasting downhill
I have become such a negative person
It was all just an act
It was all so easily stripped away“

Space Mountain – Never Lonely

“Met a friend today
And im feeling okay
She’s in my head
I’m never lonely“

Hallelujah the Hills – What Do the People Want?

“What do the people want?
The people don’t know what they want“

Mount Moriah – Calvander

“Carry on and on and on on
With your cosmic reach
Newport river whispered fate
Spells cast with every crashing wave
Neon lines and a new name“

Frederick Squire – Bike Thief

“The lights are on
And we are sinking way down in our chairs
We don’t say much of anything
Even though there’s still a lot to say“

Kevin Morby – We’ve Been Here Before

“Running my mouth off at the storm
Yelling, “man, what the hell did you do that for?“

Sam Moss – Vertebrae

“Did you watch my vertebrae
Slendering out
Or did you watch your own?
Stretching skin over the bone
I’ve grown
Learning to be proud“

Arlo Aldo – House & Home

“O’er the mountains out past the trees
where the grasslands, meet the sky
you’ll find me singin’ my songs
with my lover in my mind“

Will Johnson – Nervousness Fangs

“Jesus what a mess
what they’re all selling
and what’s being sold“

Jeremy Squires – After All

“There’s an old painting of Jesus on a wall
and a tapestry that hangs by a cross
that weighs heavy on my shoulders now and then
I get caught up with why the things we love ain’t never last“

The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes

“Fifth wind brought a howl got me in a storm
I saw a lighthouse spinning at the edge of the world
like looking through a window to the day
I was born“

Kyle Morton – Automatic

“It’s my head, it’s my head
breaking itself to make a thought but instead
Just some pornographic images to stave off my death
It’s all automatic“

Keaton Henson – Alright

“Obviously
My wounds are open to see
But don’t take them seriously
I’ll be fine“

Talons’ – Work Stories

“Is this what the end of the world looks like?
Or is this just life?“

Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road

“There are truths we may or may never know friend
and that is the point“

Mal Devisa – Sea of Limbs

“Honey-lover
keeper of the bees
Soft-spoken
seldom-seen“

Young Jesus – Hinges

“I’m pretty sure I’m a kind of collection of things
scattered throughout the backyard
under the moon
pulling weirdo slow dance moves
maybe always losing it a little
i am ashamed to believe in myself!“

Lung Cycles – For a While

“I feel like sharing
so I’ll press record
and I’ll tell you that I had a vision“

Sister Grotto – UNCANNY

“When we go, we go alone“

John K. Samson – Virtute At Rest

“You should know I am with you, know I forgive you
Know I am proud of the steps that you’ve made
Know it will never be easy or simple
Know I will dig in my claws when you stray“

If you missed it, you can see the list of our favourite albums of 2016 here, and stay tuned for our collection of the best name-your-price releases on Bandcamp next week.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Favourite Songs of 2016 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“For all the woe and doubt, the record never deviates from its primary message – each and every moment is a law unto itself, be sure to live in it and for it because, be it good or bad, it will not last forever”

To explore the record a little further, we put some questions to the faces behind Dicktations and received some rather interesting answers. Dig in below!

Hi Dicktations, thanks for speaking with us. How is life at this time of year in NYC?

Miguel: It’s just now starting to become very cold. The heat in our building is finally on and it gurgles in the manner of a large beast with Troubled Bowels. The leaves are half gone, and it is all very pretty. I find myself compulsively listening to Yo La Tengo, Nico, and Joni Mitchell. The fall is a special time—I always feel completely awful. Maybe recent L.A. transplants Brian and Torsten can offer their thoughts on the west coast’s take on this season.

Brian: LA is its usual sunny self but we actually got some decent rain this past weekend, which I loved. I’m troubled at how cold 60 degrees feels to me now. It was funny watching the debut of Jared Goff, the no. 1 pick of the Rams, playing at home in the pouring rain.

In our review of Super Paradise we mentioned how you said the album was “an index of a weird time in our lives” and was created in response to a period of what can only be described as existential crisis. Did the record help you make sense of all of that? Was it a cathartic experience in recording and releasing it to the world?

Miguel: It’s hard to say. The record took forever to make and felt like a sticky thing. Letting go of the record helped me let go of that time. But I don’t know that making music or art, for me at least, is really cathartic, or even a way of processing things. Music-making is like this alien compulsion that the events of my life, at best, furnish. My emotions and experiences are the most readily available material through which to articulate it. The compulsion is indifferent to all of that, though. Most of the time it is hard to express how I’m feeling or where I am through any medium or mode of communication, let alone music. I can’t say I really sit down and make music for the purpose of expressing myself. That being said, making music feels extremely correct, in a way that nothing else does, and in a way that I think is distinct from the classic artistic framework of catharsis and sense-making. It’s probably the only thing I do for the sake of doing it.

Brian: Agree completely with the last line, I think you summed it up really well. As far as the “weird time in our lives,” Miguel and I were both living at home, working mindless if not thankless jobs and wondering what the next step was. I kind of see my last year as a state of limbo – most days I felt like I was just hanging suspended in this reality. For me at least, it was existing, not living. That impulse pushes me to make music.

At twenty tracks, and running through a variety of styles and moods, the album is pretty much a double album in terms of length and scope. How/why did you decide that these songs all belonged on the same release? Was it to do with themes? Or the period of time in which they were written?

Miguel: We were eager to produce as much material as possible. The folder on my hard drive that contains the original demos for this record is titled ‘Dicktations Swan Song.’ It was my understanding that this was the last thing we would make when we started making it—at the time, towards the end of college and the beginning of that summer, I thought I might be moving to L.A., too. ‘Dicktations Forever’ was one of the first songs I wrote for it. The lyrics came to me spontaneously, which is rarely how it works out for me. I was about a month before graduating from school and, maybe I couldn’t recognize it at the time, I was on the cusp of this really difficult reckoning with how the self is constituted and the strangeness of being able to identify all these major, imminent changes in your life but being unable to anticipate how they will feel. That kind of provided a goal post for what the record would be about.

We used every song we recorded on the album. I tried sequencing it as a full twenty track record, and I think, by merit of these songs being written by us throughout this whole period, it felt thematically cohesive and even had a narrative arc. I think by the time I wrote ‘Heather,’ I knew it belonged at the end of the record that charted out this course towards refusing to be defined by history, trauma, and sadness. We talked a little about cutting tracks but decided not to. I have always been drawn to sprawling records that jump across genre. The first quasi-Dicktations record set out to be that way very deliberately. H*CKHOUND is basically the one time we’ve ever engaged in self-editing.

Brian: I also love the sprawlers. I’m really happy with how all the songs ended up fitting together despite the different styles. I love records that flow from song to song and I think we achieved something like that.

Who/what do you consider influences on your work, both sonically and in terms of writing? Are there art forms other than music (literature, movies, visual art etc.) which you consider important in shaping your style?

Miguel: I’ve always seen Dicktations as my dream rock n roll outlet. Something that takes its cues from everything I like from rock. I think the main reference points for my songs on that record—Thin Lizzy, The Replacements, Big Star, The Wrens—were formative for me but not necessarily indicative of what I listen to and resonate with most at this point in my life. Writing lyrics is extraordinarily difficult for me. When I was writing words for my tracks on the record I kept pushing myself to be as direct and frank as possible, which I think all those bands do well. I love the unceremonious nature of Paul Westerberg’s confessions. The way he loses his resolve at the end of ‘Unsatisfied’ or has to work his way up to sing a line like “[a]ll I know is that I’m sick of everything that my money can buy” on Here Comes a Regular. There’s nothing monumental about the way he expresses his feelings. I like to think that for all its length and scope, Super Paradise is ultimately pretty unambitious and understated.

I find literature and critical theory to be really influential on how I think about my relationship myself and others and how I ultimately write. I think my anxiety about being overdetermined by history was a pretty direct result of the spiritual and intellectual fatigue I felt studying Anthropology for four years. Most recently, the novel I Capture the Castle [by Dodie Smith] helped me finally write the words to a very difficult song.

Alex: For me, my playing style is truly influenced by my personality…and my personality is truly influenced by Kate Bush (my perception of her based on videos, interviews, and her music in general, at least). I feel very animated and emotional when playing music; sometimes I think about what I would look like if the drums were totally transparent, with just my wobbly, swishy, bouncy, flailing and/or unnaturally still body visible (i have no formal training on how to play drums in a way that won’t eventually cause self-harm) and every time: I see myself surrounded by characters in one of her amazing choreographies.

Brian: Musically, influence #1 will always be The Beatles for me I think. As far as influencing me as a writer and rocker, Bruce Springsteen. I’ve teared up to “Backstreets” so many times. Richard Thompson is a guitar god I dream of playing like one day. The Smiths, Weezer, The Band and Teenage Cool Kids are some of my other favorites. The Wrens were my soundtrack for the past year, they’re an amazing band. If I did a ‘Mount Rushmore’ of my singing influences, it would be: Jonathan Richman, Charles Bissell, Kevin Whelan, Rick Danko (so f*cking plaintive!) and Andrew Savage.

Most of your releases were accompanied by creative and rather in-depth supporting pieces of writing, which I find really interesting and illuminating. I was wondering how central these are for you to the albums as a whole? Are they footnotes or another facet of the main body?

Miguel: I think the way I’m about to answer this is a way of thinking about it that definitely came after putting out Super Paradise, so I’m almost interpreting myself here. I think of the essay and annotated map that you get when you download the album are all parts of the artwork-as-a-whole. A friend of mine mentioned using Google Maps—I do this all the time—to cruise the locations on the annotated map and in the essay while listening to the record as an illuminating experience, and I think that’s almost how I would recommend experiencing it. I think the internet and digital medium offer great opportunities to rethink what an ‘album’ is. Lemonade and visual albums are a big budget way of approaching this, but I think there are plenty of more DIY ways to realize the possibilities of the medium. H*CKHOUND dabbled in this too—the liner notes featured “stage directions” for each track.

I can be very obsessive. I love the idea of exhausting something, like what Georges Perec does in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, where sits in one intersection for days and describes every detail he sees. Or a gothic cathedral—a space so dense with signification, through all its decorative statues and stained glass, that it’s never available in its entirety to any given viewer.

You said in a recent Facebook post that Dicktations are no more, and posted a song from a new project. What can we expect from you in the future? Do you see your new work as a marked change from Dicktations?

Miguel: I’ve been doing stuff as Miserable chillers for a few years alongside Dicktations and other projects, like Drug Pizza and Magic the Happening!. Miserable chillers is my outlet for music that engages with referents that have more in common with what I’m into now. It’s synthier and a little more abstract. I’m letting my love of all those British sophisti-pop bands from the ‘80s, like Prefab Sprout, or Blue Nile, consume me.

Brian: I’ve been releasing music as Living Large since high school and recently my brother Dan (aka Rick Rubin of Dicktations) and I have recorded two albums at his spot, Boca Studios in Somerville, Mass. (Boston bands, hit him up!)

Finally, could you name four or five acts you think we should be listening to (be they old or new, popular or obscure, etc.)?

Miguel: Jay Som, Tredeci Bacci, Wintertime, and Mal Devisa are new artists that I really like. Willis Alan Ramsey is a Texas troubadour from the ‘70s who is somewhere between Townes Van Zandt and Harry Nilsson and his one album has been on heavy rotation for me for the past year. Also, Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest has been a pretty indispensable champion of our music, and I owe him a big thanks and shout out. Teens of Denial was one of my favorite indie rock records this year.

Brian: Teens of Denial is an amazing record and the show we played with them was also one of the best concerts I’ve attended. I mentioned them before, but The Wrens are one of New Jersey’s greatest bands. Out here in LA, I’ve been listening to two artists heavily: Steely Dan and more recently R.E.M. Aja and Murmur are both classics. Check out the early records. Early R.E.M. can hang with The Smiths. Our friend Chris has a gallery space (As It Stands LA, if you’re out here!) and a local band called Roses played there one time. I wasn’t at the show but I like them a lot, especially their song ‘Florence Girls.’ I recently found Greatest Palace Music by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the thrift store down my block so that’s my go-to driving CD. ‘New Partner’ is one of my all-time favorite songs.

Torsten: When I listen to Bach I feel as though God is real and that, though am I not perfect, there is a perfection I can sometimes glimpse and aspire to. It is a worthwhile trick to play on yourself. I really like John Eliot Gardiner’s groups performing the cantatas and Glenn Gould’s performances of the piano works.

You can grab Super Paradise and all of the Dicktations release now from Bandcamp.

The post Interview: Dicktations appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Indeed, Titus Andronicus are the band that I kept coming back to when listening. Take for example the searing opener, ‘The End is a Vicious Thug’, with its raw and throaty vocals and bitter, cynical lyrics:

“The end is a vicious thug
lying cheat backstabbing scum
it’ll look you in the eye –
keep you on the run from the trouble behind
past the crows the yellow sky
and the awful things that they symbolize”

The album continues in this vein, with impassioned vocals and crashing drums making for a really good time. Other standout tracks include the slacker rock love song ‘High’ (“I had the nerve to hold a flower out / You had the nerve to take it / Just keep sending smiles my way / I’ll be high for a lifetime”) and the chugging indie rock of ‘Cadence’, which has a potentially killer singalong chorus.

Like A Human Being is due for release on the 10th of March, but if you can’t wait that long then you can download it on a pay-what-you-want basis via the Puzzlecuts bandcamp page.

P.S. The album was written and recorded solo, but a full-band Puzzlecuts will be touring in the coming months. Keep your eyes peeled in case they play near you.

The post Puzzlecuts – Like a Human Being appeared first on Various Small Flames.